The disclosed aspects relate generally to communications between and/or within devices and specifically to methods and systems for reducing the overhead of near field communication (NFC) Forum NFC data exchange protocol (NDEF) messages when stored on and/or written to a remote NFC device (e.g., Tag, reader, etc.).
Advances in technology have resulted in smaller and more powerful personal computing devices. For example, there currently exist a variety of portable personal computing devices, including wireless computing devices, such as portable wireless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and paging devices that are each small, lightweight, and can be easily carried by users. More specifically, the portable wireless telephones, for example, further include cellular telephones that communicate voice and data packets over wireless networks. Many such cellular telephones are being manufactured with relatively large increases in computing capabilities, and as such, are becoming tantamount to small personal computers and hand-held PDAs. Further, such devices are being manufactured to enable communications using a variety of frequencies and applicable coverage areas, such as cellular communications, wireless local area network (WLAN) communications, near field communication (NFC), etc.
The current NFC Forum specification defines a data format (NDEF) for use during storage and retrieval of data from remote NFC devices (e.g., tags, peer devices, etc.). NDEF is currently the only NFC Forum defined way by which an NFC Forum Device can interact with other NFC devices and/or tags. As part of these interactions, a NDEF header is used. Although relatively small, the NDEF header does add overhead to the data being stored. With small/cheap tags the overhead can become a significant factor. The smaller the amount of storage available on a tag, the bigger the percentage of said storage is used for overhead. For a 64 byte tag, even a 3 byte NDEF header accounts for 5 percent of the tag storage usage. Further, for a 16 byte tag a 3 byte NDEF header accounts for approximately 20% of the tag storage usage. A smaller memory may generally use less power, and allow for faster access times, longer read/write ranges, etc.
Thus, improved apparatus and methods for reducing overhead of NDEF messages may be desired.